h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

What I meant to add was:

I have run many of the OS you have listed, both on brand spanking new machines (for their time) and on creaking old machines (as they were 2 yrs later!). Usually on home built PCs so not even standard setups that one might expect the installer to expect.

I've also run BeOS, Caldera Linux. All of these have run fine from the first install.
in fact the worst one i had was win2k. But that turned out to be me not the software!

To have such a litany of disasters seems to be either incredibly bad luck, or a common fault that is not currently identified. I guess someone has to keep the bug lists going!

I may, of course, be exaggerating things somewhat. I mean, Gentoo is the OS that works best and as long I don't want to do anything 'complex' like connect to my PDA, browse my LAN or expect sound to work consistently, it's fine.

Have you ever used a Mac? I'm going to get one in the future. I'm going to find an OS that works for me if it's the last thing I do!

I'm using Win XP as I write this. I can't stand it. I keep wanting to switch the virtual desktop.

Believe it or not, I have just had some success. On one PC, I found that the first hard drive was the problem, so I took it out and made the second hard drive the Master. I overwrote it with Mandrake Linux, and now everything on that PC works fine. I've even got two digital cameras to work flawlessly with it (Canon PowerShot A20 and Fuji FinePix S5000 if you want to know).

Has it occurred to you that there is no perfect OS?That it is a myth?

Never mind Perfection may not be achievable but it is worth striving for.

Yes, you're right. After what I've been through I realise the problems with all OSs. Of course, I haven't tried a Mac yet, and I really want to, but I've heard that they can be just as unstable as Windows.

And yes, it is worth striving for. In my battle, I think Gentoo has been my favourite, though for all-round features, Mandrake probably wins the prize.

Thanks everyone for your valuable input.

Good Grief! What a concophony of disaster! I hate to suggest you get to 14, but have you tried any live-on-cd operating systems like knoppix? You wouldn't have to install anything, and it might let you see if there is a particular something in your computer giving you grief. But in light of the problems with other people's computers too, I might also suggest a poltergiest...
yikes my spelling is atrocious today...

I've taken a look at MandrakeMove and SuSE Live-Eval 9, and everything seemed OK, but then I didn't try to do anything complex with them. I steered clear of printing and audio and networking, for example.

Thanks for your interest.

Hardly ideal OS's then.If you can't do anything like printing what's the point?

I didn't try printing with the LiveCDs; printing works fine with my hard disk installations of Gentoo and Mandrake.